The Backpage | FIFA Ultimate Team: Building A Hybrid Squad
dmcdonagh
2012-11-19
In this week’s Backpage, football journalist and FIFA fan Darren Cross looks at why a hybrid squad is worth building, and how you can do it…
After twice fluffing promotion from FUT 13 Online Seasons Division 2 in the last game of the season, I got angry with my expensively assembled Gold Prem team and decided to flog them all.
Blaming the players then selling them was perhaps a bit drastic, but the games in Division 2 had become quite difficult with my team, which made me think that I could do better if I started over. So I used the cash from auctioning the whole squad to do something I’d never properly tried before in any version of FUT… build a good hybrid.
A hybrid squad is made up of players from multiple nations and leagues, and the best ones maintain 9 chemistry for each individual player by making strong links with their team-mates. As long as your links are good – more on that in a moment – then you can put together a really varied squad. That’s a big part of the attraction of hybrids; there are many possible combinations as there’s a bigger pool of players to pick from, so building a good one can be really interesting and rewarding.
So how do you fill a squad with all these players while making sure everyone still gets a 9 chemistry rating? There are a few ways to do it, but I think the easiest is to build around players that have something in common with the different main groups you want to link.
For example, in my hybrid I wanted a really good big-man, small-man combo up front so I started looking around for relevant strikers from the same league and nation. I eventually settled on the giant Lacina Traore as my big man, with the smaller but far more explosive Seydou Doumbia as my small man. Having this kind of partnership would allow me to vary my attacks and keep my opponent guessing, as I could play through the middle and look to make use of Doumbia’s pace, or pepper the box with crosses and get Traore on the end of them.
Both players are Ivorian and play in the Russian Premier Division so – with no other players around them – initially get max chemistry because they’re also in their favourite position and formation. Now I know that if I pick an LM, CAM and RM that share nothing with Traore or Doumbia then my striker’s chemistry ratings will drop to 7, because they’ll each be touching at least two bad links. The way around this is to pick a CAM that shares something in common with them, but also with the rest of my team, which I wanted to be made up of Brazilian players. That meant having to find a Brazilian CAM from the Russian Premier Division, and fortunately there’s a very good one in Carlos Eduardo.
With Eduardo in the team Traore and Doumbia are sorted, they both stay on 9. As the rest of my team is made up of Brazilian players, everyone else receives max chemistry because they all touch enough team-mates that share the same nation. I also use a Brazilian manager.
So that CAM position is the key one in this basic hybrid line-up. When I rotate my squad I play with Inter’s Coutinho in that position, as he links with my reserve strikers Matri and Miccoli who both also play in Serie A. I could do the same with any La Liga forwards that share the same nation by signing Kaka as the link player. Or I could go for Aguero and Tevez up front and use Oscar as my link. The important thing for this particular hybrid is that my forwards must share league and nation, and my CAM must have the same league as them as well as the nation of the rest of the side.
Make sense? I hope so, because I hugely recommend building one of your own. I had a lot of fun dreaming up different combos so that my hybrid would still be as good as possible, and it is good too; as soon as I started using it I bagged the Division 2 title and I’m currently writing this week’s Backpage one game away from Division 1 glory. The Traore/Doumbia partnership has been sensational, as has the Matri/Miccoli combo, and both have been backed up by quality Brazilian team-mates.
That said, if I blow the title there’s a pretty good chance the whole squad will be sent to the trade pile, but at least that means I’ll get to build another hybrid.
As always, thanks for reading and I hope to see you back here next week.
Darren
@Darren_Cross
